(484c) High-Throughput Sensing of Single-Bacterium Growth: Toward Rapid Antibiotic Susceptibility Testing

Accurately measuring the number of viable microorganisms plays an essential role in microbiological studies including antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST). Since conventional culture-based AST methods are too time-consuming (typically 24-72 h), rapid AST is urgently needed for preventing the increasing emergence and spread of antibiotic resistant infections. Although several phenotypic antibiotic resistance sensing modalities are able to reduce the AST time to a few hours or less, concerning the biological heterogeneity, their accuracy or limit of detection are hampered by low throughput. Here, we present a rapid AST method based on whole slide imaging (WSI)-enabled high-throughput sensing of single-bacterium growth, conducted on custom-built on-glass-slide culturing device. The time for determining the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) was theoretically shortest that ensures the growth of each individual cell present in a large population is inhibited. Reliable MIC of E. cloacae against gentamicin was obtained within 1 h, while the gold standard broth dilution method required at least 16 h for the same result. Owing to the feature of high-throughput quantitative analysis, our approach can be further applied to timely identifying the rising antibiotic resistance adapted to the treatment and guiding the adjustment of treatment strategy to prevent the aggravation of antibiotic resistance.